A Year in Reading: Emily Colette Wilkinson

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During my sophomore year at Columbia, I found myself very unhappily in love. My love melancholy made reading and writing nearly impossible and my aversion to books and writing made me even more depressed. I stopped going to class, wandered around Central Park instead, chainsmoked in my room, left school for two weeks without letting anyone know. In retrospect, it seems strange that the escapism inherent in reading did not console me—that I had to learn again, had to be taught to find the consolations of the book. “The answer to all of your problems is on the next page,” a friend told me. And with that mantra—that the ultimate solace might be on the next page, in the next chapter, the next volume—I (more or less) made it through the slough of despond and the semester. Certain virulent strains of melancholia, though, resist this self-hypnosis (not to mention the tawdrier chestnuts of book-lover merch: “A book lover never goes to bed alone,” “We read to know we are not alone”). And in the past year, downhearted and listless again, most books have left me cold. But a few pulled me out of myself.

Among those: Elif Batuman‘s The Possessed, Terry Castle‘s The Professor, Justin Evans‘ A Good and Happy Child, Philip Hoare’sThe Whale. These are books to counter the listlessness: tales of possession and obsession—romantic, intellectual, cetological, demonic. Elif and Terry’s books are the first of what I hope (but doubt) will be a new era in literary scholarship. Batuman and Castle take the subjects of their essays personally (Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Doestoevsky, Art Pepper, Susan Sontag) and the result of this entwining of personal and literary history is stunning. The insight that Batuman and Castle share is that the personal, the autobiographical, does not diminish intellectual arguments and aesthetic observations—it gives them more depth and resonance. In other words, ethos and logos can only get you so far. Pathos (only connect!) is the ultimate rhetorical tool. These books are also killingly funny and even frightening: Unbeknownst to many of themselves, artists and scholars are one of humanity’s most ridiculous and sinister subspecies and The Professor and The Possessed sketch these oddfellows (self portraits included) in all of their glory, absurdity, and monstrosity. Beautiful minds and black hearts abounding.

Philip Hoare‘s The Whale entwines the scholarly and the autobiographical on a grander scale (appropriate to its leviathan subject). His book is a rich and eccentric encyclopedia of the whale and simultaneously a memoir of his lifelong love of the whale. The book is clearly a product of monomania, but it’s a beautiful, generative, mystical sort (not Ahab’s) and it wears its scholarship lightly: Hoare’s is an intensely learned book but it feels buoyant, numinous—his singularly nuanced chapters on Melville’s life and work, for example, read like personal essays even as they are laden with the weightiest of Melvilliana.

Justin Evans‘ A Good and Happy Child: While Evans’ debut novel was clearly written for adults, it put me in mind of John Bellairs‘ excellent children’s novel The Curse of the Blue Figurine. Demonic possession is the crux of Evans’ superbly plotted psychological thriller. The novel is at once deeply satisfying in the way of good genre fiction and intensely, lingeringly unnerving in a way that recollects Thomas Alfredson‘s film version of Let The Right One In. More proof that the supernatural can be genuinely provocative and interesting (see also: AMC’s The Walking Dead).

Emily Colette Wilkinson
is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.

It was mostly a year of some pleasant foothills in my reading life, and just one great peak. Best of the foothills first:

I recently finished The Killer of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr, which tells the parallel stories of Joseph Vacher, a serial killer in late-19th-century France, and Alexandre Lacassagne, a criminologist at the same time and (roughly) place. Their lives didn’t intersect quite as neatly as you might expect, but Starr’s telling is both gripping and smart.

Nearly 10 years ago, I read and fell for The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall, so I was eager to read his follow-up, The Lonely Polygamist. It didn’t disappoint. Udall is an unabashedly old-fashioned storyteller in the mold of John Irving, and he makes the wise decision to tell the story of a family with one husband, four wives, and 28 children by focusing on three characters: Golden, the title character; Trish, the fourth and most reluctant, independent, and lonely wife; and Rusty, a 12-year-old boy whose adolescent troubles are drowned out by the family’s din.

The great peak was Father and Son by Edmund Gosse, published in 1907. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read. Edmund was the son of Philip Gosse, a naturalist and fervent Christian who resisted the ideas of Darwin. Edmund’s memoir — which I learned about in A.N. Wilson’sGod’s Funeral, about the various ways in which Victorians lost their faith — tells of his upbringing and his eventual rejection of his father’s beliefs. In many ways, it’s a simple story, but the telling, both funny and profound, is brilliant. By the middle of the book, I was bracketing about every other paragraph. I’m sure I’ll read it again in its entirety someday.

Another year, another Year In Reading. Another year, a bigger Year In Reading. The site gets older, the site continues to grow – for that we thank everyone who wrote and shared the pieces in this series, as well as everyone who read along.

The numbers this year were simply bonkers. Up from 2011, our 2012 totals amounted to a whopping 74 participants and 261 different books. These books run the gamut from graphic memoirs to cookbooks, and they were written by 238 authors – we’re happy to note that 15 of those authors submitted their own pieces in the series.

Our participants included a finalist for this year’s National Book Award; a past winner of the Pulitzer Prize; not one, but two authors whose books appeared on The New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2012” list; a longtime New Yorkerstaff writer; and a comedian who, for a few incredible months, made the life of Mitt Romney’s social media director into a living hell.

The mission of the series is to put good books – regardless of publication date – into the minds of our readers. In that regard we’ve succeeded. The “average” year of publication for all 261 books was 1992. (No doubt that date has something to do with Michael Robbins’srecommendation of The Temple, which dates back to 1633.) But in order to highlight the true range of the books selected, I feel there are some awards in order. So here we have it.

Presenting the 2012 edition of The Millions’s annual Year In Reading Wrap-Up Awards:

The Golden TARDIS for Excellence in Time Travel is hereby bestowed unto Emma Straub. We recognize Emma’s ability to read in the past year four different books that will not hit shelves until 2013. Tell us, Emma, where do you keep your flux capacitor? (I know, I know, I’m mixing time travel references here. Apologies to the nerds.) Runner-up: Michael Robbins, who went the other way and tapped two books from the 1600s.

“Mr. Consistent” is from now on the epithet we’ll use to describe Scott Esposito, who recommended fourteen different Oulipo books. (Out of respect for Scott’s theme, none of the words in that first sentence included the letter “a”.) Runner-up: David Haglund, who laid out a literary and historical tour of the real Mormon faith.

The Bob Ross Memorial Golden Paintbrush is awarded to Matt Dojny, whose Year In Reading entry is beautiful and succinct, but also comprehensive and fresh. That book on his list from The RZA? It wasn’t a mistake. There aren’t mistakes. Just happy accidents. Runner-up: Chris Ware. (Duh.) Not for his text-based Year In Reading post, but for his most recent book.

The George Washington Cup for Honesty goes, of course, to Michael Schaub for his elegant, heart wrenching essay about his brother, his family, and A. M. Homes’s latest book. Thank you for this one, Michael. Runner-up: Mark O’Connell, who finally came clean. Those books on his shelf? Hasn’t read most of ‘em. (One additional prize is in order as well. The “Oh Man, Please Don’t Accuse Me of Stealing Your Idea” Memorial Fruit Basket should go to Janet Potter, whose list of literary awards served at least in some way as inspiration for this post.)

And so we come to the end of 2012. May 2013 be better than the year that led into it. May your eyes fly quickly over the page. We hope you enjoyed the time, and we’ll see you again next year.

P.S. Special shout outs are due to C. Max Magee, founder of The Millions, without whom none of this would be possible – and also to Ujala Sehgal and Adam Boretz, our tireless editors, without whom all of these posts would look horrendous. Last but not least, shout outs are owed to Rhian Sasseen and Thom Beckwith, both of whom have helped make this our biggest Year In Reading to date. Thanks to you all, and to all a Happy New Year!